Washington Post: Trump Mexico Summit Will Be a Disaster

The Washington Post is the latest mainstream media publication to declare Donald Trump’s visit to Mexico on Wednesday to be a disaster — in advance.

In an article titled “Donald Trump’s high-risk, low-reward trip to Mexico is sort of baffling,” the Post‘s Philip Bump attempts to find the dark cloud behind the silver lining of Trump’s Mexico summit. He begins by noting that Trump is deeply unpopular in the United States — ignoring completely Hillary Clinton’s comparable unfavorable ratings.

He continues with an epic bout of “concern trolling,” asking: “From our standpoint, though, the bigger question is how this benefits Trump.”

To Bump, it is unfathomable that merely visiting with the Mexican president might be beneficial to Trump, after months of being demonized by the media and the Clinton campaign as the latest incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. He envisions — hopes for? — a spectacle where President Enrique Peña Nieto humiliates his guest and destroys his campaign.

It would take a “miracle” for Trump’s visit to succeed, Bump said. Not even a photo-op between the two leaders will help, he said, because “Trump-as-statesman is a new one.”

He even likens the visit to the disastrous decision by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to suspend his presidential campaign in September 2008 in the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers on Wall Street. “The trip will, at best, show that Trump can go to a foreign country and meet with leaders without incident, a fairly low item on the presidential checklist … At worst? Who knows.”

The person likeliest to benefit from Trump’s Mexico visit, Bump says, is Hillary Clinton, given that “something might go wrong” with the visit.

And, no doubt, he and the rest of the media will spend all day looking for something upon which to pounce, so they can shout, as with Mitt Romney: “What about your gaffes?!?!?!”